Experienced quite the culture shock this weekend while visiting a southern state for the first time. Apparently free water isn't a guarantee in restaurants everywhere. We went to dinner at a fast food style restaurant and if I wanted water I would've had to buy a bottle from them. I went without any drinks, but I now understand why some people in the south only drink soda (if you have to pay either way may as well get the one that comes with refills).

In a hopefully fortuitous turn of events, my paycheck is coming a day early this week because much of the world gets Friday off for Easter. That means my buy order is executing today instead of tomorrow. I may be lucky enough to time the dip!

...or it will keep falling and I'll wish I'd bought on the usual day. But I'm headed out of town for the rest of the week so I won't have to think about it until next week!

Good God, this takes me back to middle school when we were obsessed with this song/chant/animation (what even was it?)

Based on the second one, you must work in IT. I swear every IT person I've called has this super power

...if it identifies a pathway it can claim to be legal

Based on everything else they have done ignoring legality, I have very little faith they won't just start doing it anyways.

I'm really, really good at peeling oranges with my bare hands (or at least I used to be in grade school when all my friends would make me do it for them). The problem is, I hate the taste of oranges so I never use this power.

Reminder: This is why we don't panic sell.

For some reason, everyone always assumes the next downturn will look exactly like the last one. And then they're always surprised when it's caused by something completely different, so they assume this is the time everything will go to zero.

Maybe someday they will be right and this is the time everything collapses. Or maybe it won't. But it is different every time. Either way, I hate that the US gov is intentionally crashing the market for stupid reasons. I can only hope it is temporary and people aren't too badly hurt by this.

The challenge being, even if you had sold to avoid the dip, would you be able to time buying back in before the recovery?

You have to get it right twice to be better off than if you had just stayed invested.

Had dinner at my parents house last night. My dad asked if I sold all my stocks to invest in bonds. No dad, why would I do that? -_-

Would they be interested in learning about those things from someone other than you? JL Collins's stock series was enormously helpful for my understanding of investing when I started out. You could give them the book the "Simple Path to Wealth" (the edited/published version of the series) and it would be zero effort on your part. Bonus: he started writing it to teach his teenage daughter about investing, so the target audience would be perfect for your nieces (making some assumptions re: ages).

This week my credit union announced they will start depositing paychecks/social security up to 2 days early. Imagine my surprise when I logged in today and saw my paycheck already deposited!

Unfortunately, this is only my joint account and my primary bank where I make my investment purchases through doesn't even show the paycheck as pending. I might consider switching my direct deposit entirely to this company, so I can buy my index funds 2 days earlier...

Booked the inca trail to machu pichu for later this year. Really living it up here in the boring middle!

Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.

I did do some market timing today by contributing the last $200 to max out my IRA. I was waiting for my next paycheck in 2 weeks, but decided to finish it off after I saw the market drop for the day. We shall see if I made a good choice in the coming days.

Overall, I have a comfortable e-fund and enough years to retirement that the volatility isn't a big concern. I mostly check out of curiosity.

It hurts itself in its confusion

Just got informed I'm getting a bonus this year. It's <30% of the normal target. I guess I should be thankful to get anything given half of the company just got cut. For some reason, I'm irritated that it's a fraction of what I normally get, even though it'll all just go into savings.

Every little bit to push me closer to not needing to deal with this garbage anymore.

I download books from my library to my kindle. It goes through Amazon though, so I assume I am also impacted by this BS.

You should be fine re: the wash rule. Just remember it's 30 days before and after the sale (so make sure if you bought any of that security 30 days before you sold, you have to have sold that lot as well).

Got home from being out of town and my personal laptop is broken. It seems either to be a dead motherboard or dead hard disks? Not really a computer person and mostly used Gemini to even get that close to understanding what was going on. It is probably ~4.5 - 5 years old so I'm guessing it's about time for a replacement.

Any one have suggestions for a decent laptop? I mostly use it for web browsing/streaming. I do also use it to process photos after vacations. Not trying to break the bank while still getting a decent product with a hopefully better lifespan.

Wondering if I'm being penny wise, pound foolish here.

Just took a 9 hour drive to another state. Route 1 has a portion of the road that is a $6 toll. Route 2 detours around the toll, but adds 20 min of drive time. I went with route 2, but am wondering what others might say.